The Ten Faces of Innovation: Ideo's Strategies for Beating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization

I found Tom Kelley's book "The Ten Faces of Innovation" to be easy reading but also very helpful for my understanding of the needs of my global multi-disciplinary project teams. The investment projects I lead require close collaboration across cultures and across the functional silos of Marketing, Estimating, Sales, Project Operations and Supply Chain. While my intuitive sense of what is right is based upon experience, I do not have a broad network of peers experienced in innovation theory or broad ranges of experience applying those theories. Tom Kelley's book offers concise examples of success in diverse scenarios and the personality traits of the people who made the success possible. This provides me that additional level of insight and reinforcement I find valuable as I manage my team and extended project team deliverables. As opposed to academics who may offer an endless stream of opinions based on theory, Tom Kelley's book offers practical advice based on his own personal experiences over the past 20 years.

Kelley takes the reader on tour of the IDEO design studio through his explainations of the ten personas that he believes make innovation happen. I've never really thought of working anyplace else after I joined IBM, but the types of work and the culture he describes in the book make IDEO a real contender if I ever was to leave IBM. The personas he describes are applicable to any environment, not just IDEO. They are personas, and not job roles. He makes this very clear. Someone can be a software engineer and also manifest a number of the personas described. The Ten Faces are: The Anthropologist observes the way people behave with a "beginner's mind" to observe nuances that provide a deep understanding of how people interact with their environment. The Experimenter prototypes, and prototypes again. Often in real time drawing on diverse resources to build and test out ideas. This desire to prototype goes as much for objects as it does for services and experiences. The Cross-Pollinator explores other industries and cultures and then translates what they find into the fields they are responsible for. Cross pollinators are also called "t-shaped" people because they have depth in at least one area and breadth of knowledge in many fields. The Hurdler works to overcome obstacles and roadblocks by outsmarting them. Budgets, adversity, bureaucracies and failures are all challenges that The Hurdler may come up with ingenious ways to overcome. The Collaborator "often leads from the middle of the pack" to bring people together and build new solutions. Collaborators work with teammates, colleauges and even competitors. This is similar to Gladwell's Tipping Point notion of a 'connector' The Director brings together talented people and provides an environment and direction fo them to spark their creative talents. They give the spotlight to others and rise to tough challenges, using brainstorming as a way to let talented people shine. The Experience Architect looks to appeal to people's deep needs by developing compelling experiences. The focus on key elements of an experience that are crucial to its succes.These trigger points can be as simple as the alarm clock and bed in a hotel room. The Set Designer creates environments that allow team members to do their best work. The realize that the work environment is an important element of what makes people productive. They make things like brainstorming lounges and dynamic work environments possible. The Caregiver looks to serve customers in a way that is beyond standard service. They anticipate what customers will need and plan for it in advance. The Storyteller carries on the tradition of sharing narratives that communicate fundemental emotions or values. They eschew the 'fast path' where a story would be more appropriate, avoiding 'cutting to the chase' when they can instead engange people in a dialog that moves them. This crowd is not a big fan of Powerpoint :-) The book's attention aestetic to deta

The Ten Faces of Innovation will remind many people of earlier works that favor mental diversity such as de Bono's Six Thinking Hats and von Oeck's A Kick in the Seat of the Pants. What's different about The Ten Faces of Innovation is that it has many examples built around the experiences of one organization, the product design firm IDEO. Mr. Kelley is the general manager of that organization which makes this book into both an insider memoir and a sales brochure. So think of this book as being both a thesis and a case history. Multiple examples from one organization in group creativity and innovation have been hard to find in the business literature. Like most case histories, this one is full of fun stories and occasional examples that may be new to you. But you soon get the idea that innovation is all about understanding the market, observation as people use offerings and try to solve problems, brainstorming alternatives, rapid prototyping and quick experimentation -- Themes that are developed in more detail in Mr. Kelley's earlier book, The Art of Innovation. The ten faces are anthropologist (see what's been going on), experimenter (try something new), cross-pollinator (attach two things together for the first time), hurdler (get past stalls), collaborator (bring people together to cooperate), director (set the action into a coherent whole), experience architect (make it Wow!), set designer (facilitate interaction through the environment), caregiver (nurture those involved) and the story teller (who gets the nub of the truth across in a few words -- with plenty of reference to Stephen Denning's, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling -- a fine book). In the end, Mr. Kelley points out that not every team will have all ten faces, that some people can put on more than one face and you sometimes just have to do the best you can. Some of these roles are creative while others are more into integration or execution. That part of the taxonomy wasn't as well developed. The book would have been stronger if that line of thought had been spelled out more in the various situations that arise. By the end, I found myself a little bored and a little disappointed. While Mr. Kelley knows a lot about his own organization and its projects for famous clients, he's on less firm ground when he writes about others . . . often relying on books rather than interviews. I was particularly struck that he entirely missed mentioning P & G's new approach to developing new products through contests among world experts. That method seemingly makes a lot of what Mr. Kelley is saying obsolete. Perhaps it is still relevant if you cannot afford to run such global contests. But most organizations can based on the Goldcorp Challenge model. You will probably gain more benefit from reading The Art of Innovation than this one. I also recommend Corporate Creativity as a better source of case studies for how companies have accomplished more through their own creative ef

It seems I've valued my ability to play Devil's Advocate a bit too highly. According to Thomas Kelley, I may have had a hand in quashing new ideas rather than enouraging them. Not that there's anything wrong with playing Devil's Advocate, but why limit yourself to a single role? You could become typecast as an idea-killer -- a singularly difficult rut to get out of. Kelley outlines ten other roles -- "Faces" -- that you can adopt when going through the creative process. Anthropologist, Experimenter, Cross-Pollinator, Hurdler, Collaborator, Director, Experience Architect, Set Designer, Storyteller, and Caregiver. Each Face falls into a persona category of Learning, Organizing, or Building. While no single Face is going to make your ideas any more successful than another, being able to play each role (or assemble a team with a complementary strength in each role) will only increase your chances for success, and make your ideas stronger than ever. Then Ten Faces also give you an excellent response to that guy (that guy who is no longer me!) who says "Let me play Devil's Advocate a moment..." and proceeeds to rip into your idea and rain on your parade. Simply respond with "Well, let me play Hurdler a moment and tell you how we can get around that problem." or "Let me play Anthropologist a moment and tell you what I've found when observering our customers." The Ten Faces of Innovation basically gives you the ability to tell the Devil's Advocate to "Go to... Heck."

With Jonathan Littman, Kelley provides in this volume a wealth of information and counsel which can help any decision-maker to "drive creativity" through her or his organization but only if initiatives are (a) a collaboration which receives the support and encouragement of senior management (especially of the CEO) and (b) sufficient time is allowed for those initiatives to have a measurable impact. There is a distressing tendency throughout most organizations to rip out "seedlings" to see how well they are "growing." Six Sigma programs offer a compelling example. Most are abandoned within a month or two. Why? Unrealistic expectations, cultural barriers (what Jim O'Toole characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom"), internal politics, and especially impatience are among the usual suspects. That said, I agree with countless others (notably Amabile, Christensen, Claxton, de Bono, Drucker, Kelley, Kim and Mauborgne, Michalko, Ray, and von Oech) that innovation is now the single most decisive competitive advantage. How to establish and then sustain that advantage? In an earlier work, The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm, Kelley shares IDEO's five-step methodology: Understand the market, the client, the technology, and the perceived constraints on the given problem; observe real people in real-life situations; literally visualize new-to-the-world concepts AND the customers who will use them; evaluate and refine the prototypes in a series of quick iterations; and finally, implement the new concept for commercialization. With regard to the last "step", as Bennis explains in Organizing Genius, Apple executives immediately recognized the commercial opportunities for PARC's technology. Larry Tesler (who later left PARC for Apple) noted that Jobs and colleagues (especially Wozniak) "wanted to get it out to the world." But first, obviously, the challenge was to create that "it" which they then did. In this volume, as Kelley explains, his book is "about innovation with a human face. [Actually, at least ten...hence its title.] It's about the individuals and teams that fuel innovation inside great organizations. Because all great movements are human-powered." He goes on to suggest that all good working definitions of innovation pair ideas with action, "the spark with fire. Innovators don't just have their heads in the clouds. They also have their feet on the ground." Kelley cites and then examines several exemplary ("great") organizations which include Google, W.L. Gore & Associates, the Gillette Company, and German retailer Tchibo. I especially appreciate the fact that Kelley focuses on the almost unlimited potential for creativity of individuals and the roles which they can play, "the hats they can put on, the personas they can adopt...[albeit] unsung heroes who work on the front lines of entrepreneurship in action, the countless people and teams who make innovation happen day in a